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The 50-year-old Seattle man — a former world traveler, triathlete and cyclist — learned he had leukemia five years ago, followed by an even grimmer diagnosis in 2016: a rare form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

An interior and urban designer who legally changed his given name, McQ had been in pain and physical decline for years. Then the disease threatened to shut down his ability to swallow and breathe.

Six tech giants have joined together in favor of interoperability, sending out a joint statement pushing greater information exchange for the sake of cloud- and AI-based tools.In their statement, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Salesforce encouraged using open standards and open-source tools to achieve interoperability and “frictionless data exchange,” which they said would improve patient care and lower costs.”We share the common quest to unlock the potential in healthcare data, to deliver better outcomes at lower costs,” they wrote.

Women struggling with symptoms like vaginal dryness and pain during sex, may be drawn to treatments, marketed as “vaginal rejuvenation,” that claim to fix such issues.

Providers who offer the treatments, often dermatologists or plastic surgeons’ offices, often claim they can not only cure discomfort, but also tighten the vagina and give it a more “youthful appearance.”

Emergency department visits in California have increased by 44 percent over the last 10 years, despite expansions in health coverage and attempts to steer patients away from the emergency room.

That’s according to a look at emergency department trends in California from 2006 to 2016 that was published by the California Healthcare Foundation last week.

The trends defy efforts by the health care industry to reduce use of the ER, as it tends to be the most expensive place to treat patients, driving up the cost of health insurance and government programs and making health care more expensive for everyone.

A contrast to the colorful “#JustBe” banners that have triumphantly adorned LGBT-popular West Hollywood, California, during Pride and Trans Pride festivities lives in a questionable corner of the web on transgendersurgeries.com.

“We want to help you become, who you really are,” the site says, elsewhere detailing the surgical steps that will be taken for male-to-female clients seeking sex reassignment surgery from a “team of specialist doctors” in Mexico. “Aquier (sic) breasts you have dreamed of being the all natural you!”

A separate listing from GRS Mexico on a site run by PlacidWay – a medical tourism company based in Colorado – offers Guadalajara-based sex reassignment surgery at a steal: $10,000, well below the roughly $50,000 price tag in a U.S.-based clinic.

More and more Democrats are signing onto making the government the only payer of healthcare services, but they’re about to face a considerable adversary in the hospital industry.

Hospitals tell the Washington Examiner that while they support “universal coverage,” in which everyone has some way to pay for medical care, they don’t want a state or federal government to be the only one funding it. As the debate over what is known as “single payer” healthcare continues to take hold, they will become a more vocal part of the opposition.

The state budget that kicked in last month devotes more than $100 billion to Medi-Cal, California’s health system for the poor. The bulk of that money will be spent on a tiny fraction of patients. And although they’re in need of help, they’re not the sickest people.

Just 10 percent of state-supported patients use up almost two thirds of the Medi-Cal budget;

Only 5 percent of patients account for more than half of Medi-Cal spending;

One percent of Medi-Cal’s current 13.2 million enrollees, or 132,000 people, will use up more than a quarter of the money.

For those who make too much money to qualify for health insurance subsidies on the individual market, there may be no Goldilocks moment when shopping for a plan. No choice is just right.

A policy with an affordable premium may come with a deductible that’s too high. If the copayments for physician visits are reasonable, the plan may not include their preferred doctors.

These consumers need better options, and in early August federal officials offered a strategy to help bring down costs for them.

The guidance is from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, which oversees the insurance marketplaces set up by the Affordable Care Act. CMS is encouraging states to allow the sale of plans outside of those exchanges that don’t incorporate a surcharge insurers started tacking on last year.

After evacuating two weeks ago for the Mendocino Complex Fire, hospice CEO Corrigan Gommenginger offered that advice as the most critical piece for leadership teams at small health care companies all around California.

Gommenginger has led the nonprofit Hospice Services of Lake County in Lakeport for 3 1/2 years and, in that time, wildfires have swept through swaths of his county four times. This year was different for him and his staff of 50. This was the first time they had to evacuate.

“Firefighters stopped the fire before a lot of structures, including ours, were engulfed,” said Gommenginger.

“They estimate it came within an eighth of a mile. It was on the west. It was coming east toward us. …There’s a whole hillside that our office looks out on, Hopland and Cow mountains. That’s all completely burned.”

One hundred silver birds float overhead, part of a menagerie of sculptures that greets visitors in all corners of the building. Cushioned easy chairs face a green lawn just outside. Gentle piano music wafts through the air.

This, surrounded by tall trees and lavender fields on the Stanford University campus, may be the fanciest new medical center for children in the country.

Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford is billed as the hospital of the future, but it doesn’t look much like a hospital at all. It is some hybrid of hotel, museum, and high-tech laboratory. Even the operating rooms are covered with murals.

The CMS‘ plan to allow Medicare Advantage plans to require patients to try low-cost generics before stepping up to more expensive therapies could have an unforeseen consequence: increased hospitalizations.

The CMS announced late Tuesday that MA plans can impose step therapy on Part B drugs starting next year. Step therapy allows a plan to determine whether patients should try a low-cost generic before working their way up to a costlier product if the initial treatment is ineffective.

Making this change could delay what providers deem to be the appropriate treatment for a patient, according to Onisis Stefas, vice president of pharmacy operations at Northwell Health.

Brian E. Hill, MD, wants to change the world of healthcare. The Atlanta urologist followed his childhood dream to become a physician, but once he began practicing medicine, found himself disheartened about how the landscape had changed.

He embarked on a quest to study the U.S. healthcare system and wrote a book, Stop the Noise: A Physician’s Quest to Silence the Politics of Health Care Reform. The book led to speaking engagements, media exposure, and opportunities to testify before Congress, as well as connections with healthcare innovators and thought leaders.

Inspired by that journey, he’s become an innovator himself, joining forces with three other like-minded individuals to found HIPnation, an Atlanta physician practice management company that offers a novel approach to the practice of medicine. Operating through a membership model, HIPnation removes health insurance from the physician-patient equation and provides patients 24/7 access to their primary care physician.

The respective governing boards at Dignity Health and Catholic Health Initiatives have encountered multiple setbacks in their quest to merge the two organizations since formal negotiations began in 2016, and there are few indications that they will consummate the deal soon.

Paperwork filed with the California attorney general hint at some fundamental problems with combining the organizations, which have contrasting financial standings and differing management structures.

As more health systems throw their weight into direct contracts with employers that require them to use data to manage healthcare costs and quality for large populations—tasks traditionally performed by health insurers—some question whether they have the chops to pull it off. “There are some providers who have the analytics capabilities to make a meaningful run at an issue like this, but not many, and I don’t even think it’s most,” said Rulon Stacey, managing director and strategy business unit leader with the consulting firm Navigant.

After her kidneys failed from the same illness that took the lives of her mother and brother, Anne Rupp went on dialysis in May 2016, spending three hours a day, three times a week undergoing the blood-cleaning procedure. She hated it.

Rupp, who had polycystic kidney disease, joined more than 95,000 other Americans on kidney transplant lists.

Medicaid home care aides — hourly workers who help the elderly and disabled with daily tasks like eating, getting dressed and bathing — are emerging as the latest target in the ongoing power struggle between conservatives and organized labor.
About half a million of these workers belong to the Service Employees International Union, a public-sector union that represents almost 1.9 million workers in the United States and Canada. The union is an influential donor to liberal politicians and boasted strong ties to the Obama administration.

With its new proposed rule, the CMS is taking yet another tack in its push for greater interoperability by changing the requirements for accountable care organizations’ electronic health record use.Under the rule, for performance years starting in 2019, ACOs would have to verify annually that a certain portion of their eligible clinicians are using 2015 Edition-certified EHRs to record clinical notes and communicate with patients and other providers.

Dr. Martin Makary treats patients with chronic pancreatitis at Johns Hopkins Hospital. While surgery can alleviate the debilitating pain, its ultimate success for patients with opioid-use disorder hinges on whether they go to an outpatient pain-management treatment center, the Johns Hopkins professor of health policy said. But getting patients into an evidence-based treatment center is a struggle, and not just in Baltimore.